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Coffee Chat: Building a Self-Service Portal  ☕

akshara.sruthi
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Hey everyone! Thank you for showing support to this post by hitting Subscribe to my previous post.

We realized that July 7 is right after a good long weekend for most of us, so we’ve decided to host this coffee chat next week.

So our new date is July 14, 11:00 am EST. Please block your calendars for about 45 minutes to answer five questions. To keep this session as engaging as possible, I’ve chosen a topic that’s one of our favorite. 

The topic of discussion is: Building a Self-Service Portal 
 

Q1. How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use. 

Q2. What are the challenges you encountered while coming up with a self-service portal

Q3. What are the common mistakes you see while people implement self-service

Q4. How do you measure the effectiveness of your self-service portal

Q5. What do you think is the future of self-service?

@Bethany Wesley, @zachary.king, @manns, @chianne.shepherd - I look forward to hearing your thoughts. 

86 replies

A
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

Q5: What do you think is the future of self-service?

A5:

  • Distinct increase in % of queries resolved by self service
  • AI and chat bots are going to be the norm

 

Warden Brown
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A2. One of the challenge we have right now is dealing with multilingual issues.
Service Requests aren’t really supporting multiple languages.

I get it. Global support is usually challenging but I think it should be done to make sure a business is inclusive. 

Mutliple languages aren’t only necessary in global support scenarios. I work for a school district, so our focus is very local. However, we have MANY languages in our community that are important to support. We haven’t figured out how to do that yet in the self-service portal. I really do wish FreshService had a language selector, at a minimum. We’d still have to provide articles in multiple languages, but that a language selector would be an excellent start.

akshara.sruthi
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Q3. I’ve also seen people organize their articles into categories that are similar to their company’s organizational structure, instead of grouping them into categories that will make sense to the user. Customers do not necessarily know which department at your organization takes care of XYZ issue, and so won’t know where to look for the answer.


I agree with this 💯
It’s best to organize and use terms that customers/users are aware of. 

akshara.sruthi
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

Q5: What do you think is the future of self-service?
 

A5. I expect to see a move away from portals, where people have to go to find help. With help instead made available in the context of the work they’re doing (at that moment in time). Machine learning will be leveraged more too, making it easier to get to the help that’s needed. Hopefully, it’s still related – the use of self-healing too, even if based on the end user being alerted that an issue is imminent and needing to press a button to self-apply a preventative resolution.



Yep. I think a mix of traditional support, self-service, as well as Bots that can comprehend which problems need human intervention.

akshara.sruthi
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

Q5: What do you think is the future of self-service?

I’m really happy that so many of you took the time to join us here. I’m taking the time to read every post to make sure I don’t miss out any of the valuable information. I’ll reply to you folks shortly. 

P.S. In a couple of days, I’ll post the summary here to make sure it serves as a recap or TLDR for those who couldn’t make it. 

Thank you for organising this, and for everyone’s input, it has been nice to see ideas and guidance from other community members as well as administrators.



So glad to see you here, @Bex. Glad you liked it.  

rashmi.nag
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Last question for today is here :coffee:

To answer a question, tag the answer with the corresponding number. For example, if you are answering this question Q5, start your answer with A5 and use the Quote option :) 
 

Q5: What do you think is the future of self-service?

I’m really happy that so many of you took the time to join us here. I’m taking the time to read every post to make sure I don’t miss out any of the valuable information. I’ll reply to you folks shortly. 

P.S. In a couple of days, I’ll post the summary here to make sure it serves as a recap or TLDR for those who couldn’t make it. 

 

This has been wonderful and so insightful! Got to hear and learn from the experiences of so many community members from across the globe! Looking forward to more such sessions in the future :)

Cheers, Rashmi || Team Refresh Community
akshara.sruthi
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Alright folks, I had an amazing time organizing this. Thank you being a part of our coffee chat, 
@manns, @Warden Brown, @Johan L, @LeonieWagenaar, @Bex, and @epetrutis :coffee:

A huge shout out to all my co-community members aka my friends at work for helping me pull this out:  @Arvind Ramamurti, @rashmi.nag, @Divya Murthy, @vishnu.selvaraj and @prashanthini.mande  :heart_eyes:     

 See you all in the next edition of our coffee chat. Feel free to keep those conversations going

rashmi.nag
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For everyone who is new to the Freshworks Community, we welcome you! :heart_eyes:

We’d love for all of you to explore the rest of the Community, subscribe to the topics of your interest and keep engaging with us! There’s so much we can all learn from one another. :hugging:

A few quick links:

  1. What’s Trending - Check out buzzing and widely discussed topics on the Community

  2. Interest Areas - Discuss everything around how you can constantly innovate and deliver better experiences to your employees, customers and partners!

  3. Product Updates - To check out latest updates on the Freshworks products

  4. Idea Exchange - To share and vote for ideas that resonate with you to help us build what’s right for you!

  5. Freshworks Academy Forums - To ask, learn and share anything with the Academy Community

Looking forward to seeing you all more often on the community!

Cheers, Rashmi || Team Refresh Community
Ace
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Q1.How many of you use self-service. Why do you use or why don’t you use.

A1. I’ve used. A typical organization has its business processes revolving around- customers, stakeholders, employees, suppliers etc. To facilitate optimal performance of doing business, it is highly important that a common portal is implemented to serve the real time right information, at the right time to the right recipient. When visibility of information is increased, employees would become efficient which in turn would help increase customer and supplier satisfaction alike- thereby boosting organizational productivity.

Q2. What are the challenges you encountered while coming up with a self-service portal?

A2. Too early to comment. Figuring things out currently with the Freshdesk self service portal.

Q3.What are the common mistakes you see while people implement self-service

A3. - Managing uncategorized bulk of tickets- causing the customer to wait for a longer period than requiredFailing to make a thorough analysis of KB and taking steps to improve it. Regular evaluation and updation is a must

  • Lack of simple navigation. Not managing the issues and appropriate solutions in proper places logically, failing use proper category names 

  • Forgetting to place a search bar is a building a failed self service all together

  • Keeping it up to date- design, categorizing, using screenshots etc

Q4. How do you measure the effectiveness of your self-service portal?

A4.a)Team performance KPIs- Average first time response, First response SLA%, resolution SLA%, first contact resolution%, number of resolved tickets per month

b)Customer Satisfaction KPIs- CSAT score, rating response rate, average number of customer replies, Net Promoter Score(NPS)

c)Business Level BPIs- Customer churn analysis, monthly ticket volume, peak load analysis, regional information, Customer Effort Score(CES)

Q5. What do you think is the future of self-service?

A5. -Self service should become mandatory on days with high call volume

      - Customer support would purely become self- service

      - Knowledge management for agent is highly important for agents( especially in such pressing work from home scenarios) through FAQs to navigate useful info on processes that they might need help with on important customer calls

      - Need for powerful technology to fill the gap between what customer want and the what current state of self service has to offer

 

D
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Just Born is currently using SAP for our ERP platform.

 

prashanthini.mande
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Hi @akshara.sruthi,

We’ve setup a basic Knowledge Base for Level 0 or Self Service support. Is there any way to get some user analytics from the site? We are using a Sprout Plan.

 

What kind of analytics are you looking for, Bruce? You can see the basic stats like total views, and how many people found it helpful/unhelpful in the solutions tab under the analytics section of each article.

Deeper insights are available in the higher plans. You can check out this article: https://support.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/articles/50000002846-understanding-the-curated-knowledge-base-reports#

Check out Freshworks Academy

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